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They were not on a junket, I can assure you.

The 60 or so lawmakers and Roundhouse staff members who made the trip to Nashville on Aug. 15-18 were participating in the annual meeting of the National Conference of State Legislatures, an elaborate symposium and exhibition featuring panel discussions on every conceivable domestic policy topic you can think of.

You haven't seen democracy in action until you've been to a National Conference of State Legislatures event and rubbed shoulders with 6,000 state lawmakers, spouses, staffers, lobbyists and industry representatives and heard speeches by American historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, University of Tennessee women's basketball coach Pat Summitt and Michael Chertoff, U.S. secretary of Homeland Security. They were all there.

As a lobbyist for a law firm, I was afforded the opportunity this year to travel to the conference for the first time and personally experience the process. I went to get a feel for what kinds of issues may surface in the next legislative session that could have an effect on my firm's clients.

My only regret is that more legislators didn't attend, because they are gun-shy about going to a conference put on by an organization as reputable as the National Conference of State Legislatures. Their fear is the public may perceive that they're on a junket. I've never seen a junket in which the program book that highlights policy discussions is 128 pages long.

Knowledgeable legislators make for healthy states, and healthy states make a strong nation.

Let me now say how envious I am of Nashville for having a facility like the Gaylord Opryland Resort. This place has 2,881 rooms, 288,000 square feet of contiguous exhibit hall space - largest in the United States - plus nine acres of gardens, an indoor re-creation of the New Orleans' French Quarter, boat rides inside an atrium on a delta river stocked with catfish, brim and bass, a 44-foot waterfall, six restaurants and a sushi bar.

The property is so large that the staff started decorating for Christmas in early August.

Oh, what Albuquerque could do if it had a facility like the Gaylord Opryland. Our lawmakers could stay right here.

Which leads me to the point of this column: I appreciate the effort that has been put into the Albuquerque Convention Center and how hard everyone on the Albuquerque Convention and Visitors Bureau, the Albuquerque Hispano Chamber of Commerce and city staff work to help bring in our fair share of convention business.

But we aren't much of a convention town, because we don't have enough hotel rooms, amenities and exhibitor offerings to play with the big boys. Our convention center just doesn't cut it.

The big boys aren't that big. Nashville's metro area population is only about 1.2 million. Is it too much to ask for a little vision here?

Bullington is a senior policy adviser for the Brownstein, Hyatt and Farber law firm. He welcomes comments at jdbullington@gmail.com